The 16th edition of Message to Man\u2019s experimental film competition once again offers a collection of subjective remarks on the human being, memory, consciousness, and the world. The programme seems to split roughly in half: introspective films, which look for questions and answers inside the author\u2019s head, and extraspective ones, which take their questions and answers to the world outside. But the line between intro- and extraspection is not always clear, and the optic through which the author conveys their experience to us can scale without limit in whatever direction interests them.<\/p>\n
The programme is divided into three screenings, in which three main themes stand out: beauty and the pain of losing it; our relations with ourselves and with others; technology and memory.<\/p>\n
This year the experimental competition features many artists already familiar to us: Frank Heath, Anna Vasof, Mikhail Basov, Nikita Spiridonov, Anton Drozdov-Schastlivtsev, Maxim Eruzhenets and Marina Kirakosyan, Nicolaas Schmidt, Daniele Grosso, and also a classic of the film avant-garde, our frequent participant and a source of inspiration, John Smith. But most of the directors are here for the first time. Among them are four from St. Petersburg: Alena Tereshko reflecting on a provocative painting by Rubens; Roman Mikhailov staging a poetic performance in an ominous space; Dasha Iskrenko finding invisible narratives on a walk along the seashore; Ksusha Kernosenko using a witty cinematic experiment to explore the workings of childhood memory.<\/p>\n
Once a competition programme is assembled, one always hopes to spot certain trends and tendencies in it; but the choice is subjective, and chance plays no small part. Nevertheless, when brought together, the films inevitably form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, just as is often the case with fellow passengers on long-distance trains and the audience at our screenings.<\/p>\n
Mikhail Zheleznikov<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 16th edition of Message to Man\u2019s experimental film competition once again offers a collection of subjective remarks on the human being, memory, consciousness, and the world. The programme seems to split roughly in half: introspective films, which look for questions and answers inside the author\u2019s head, and extraspective ones, which take their questions and answers to the world outside. But the line between intro- and extraspection is not always clear, and the optic through which the author conveys their experience to us can scale without limit in whatever direction interests them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"annum":[177],"class_list":["post-52006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curator-text","annum-177"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52006"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52011,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52006\/revisions\/52011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52006"},{"taxonomy":"annum","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/message2man.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/annum?post=52006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}